🚀 Thinking Machines lands historic seed round

Welcome back, Superhuman. You don’t get this kind of insider access every day. An engineer who left OpenAI a few weeks ago just pulled back the curtain on what it’s really like to work there, including why Slack runs the show and how Codex came together in just seven weeks.

Today: Learn how to create LinkedIn headshot portraits with ChatGPT, and get the latest prompts, headlines, and social posts.

TODAY IN AI

1. Thinking Machines Lab secures historic seed round: With $2B in funding from backers like Nvidia and CISCO, Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s secretive startup is now valued at $12B, even though its first product is still months away. The company’s multimodal research head, Alexander Kirillov, teased that it has already made several breakthroughs “that previously seemed intractable,” clearing the way for “the most ambitious multimodal AI program in the world.”

2. Nvidia scores major chip export win: The White House gave Nvidia the green light to restart its H20 AI chip sales to China after months of export restrictions. While not as powerful as the chips US companies have access to, the H20 is thought to have played a major role in training DeepSeek’s industry-shaking R1 model earlier this year. Jensen Huang successfully convinced the US government that cutting off China’s chip access would only incentivize the country to build its own processors, ultimately fueling its AI progress.

3. Mistral unveils ‘world’s best’ speech recognition models: French AI startup Mistral just launched Voxtral Small and Mini, two open-source models designed for transcribing and summarizing speech as well as translating audio across multiple languages. At 24B parameters, Small is best for production-scale apps, while its 3B sibling is efficient enough to run locally. Both match or beat comparable models from ElevenLabs and OpenAI, while coming in at half the price.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

AI progress might be moving much faster than expected

2025 was supposed to be the year of the agent, with AI finally becoming smart enough to take repetitive tasks off our plates. But we might have just jumped straight to the next stage. In some specialized subject areas, AI is going well beyond augmenting human work. Instead, it’s making discoveries that are already shaping the real world.

Here are a couple of recent examples:

• Google’s Big Sleep, which was developed last year to spot software vulnerabilities, just made a big catch. It spotted a cybersecurity exploit right as it was about to be used in an attack, giving experts enough time to patch it. Google thinks it’s “the first time an AI agent has been used to directly foil efforts to exploit a vulnerability in the wild.”

• A “self-driving” lab at North Carolina State University recently went online. It uses machine learning to automate chemical experiments, collecting about 10x the data of a traditional lab. The new system could potentially speed up material discoveries from years to days across industries like clean energy and electronics.

But it goes beyond agents: Earlier this year, an analysis from the nonprofit research lab METR revealed that AI models are doubling the length of tasks they can handle roughly every seven months. Now, a new batch of research suggests a similar trend is taking place across fields like self-driving, robotics, math, and scientific reasoning. If anything, evidence points to the rate of progress speeding up, with a median doubling time of just 4.5 months across nine different benchmarks.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to create LinkedIn headshot portraits with ChatGPT

• Open ChatGPT

• Upload your image

• Use the prompt below and press Enter

Sample Prompt: "Using the attached selfie as an exact reference, generate a high-resolution professional headshot that preserves 100% of my facial features, including face shape, hair, skin, tone, and expression. Apply studio quality lighting and a soft neutral background, and adjust my attire to formal professional wear ensuring the image exudes confidence and approachability for a LinkedIn profile."

• Wait for your result and tweak if necessary

^{source: amosuibk on X}

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IN THE KNOW

What’s trending on socials and headlines today

🖼️ Reality Remixed: Creative technologist Martin Nebelong uncovered a “hidden” Veo trick that lets you drop real-life objects into AI-generated scenes.

🧑‍💻 From the Source: Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar thinks Claude Code is the best place to build a general agent to automate your work tasks and daily routines. Here’s the exact setup he uses.

🕹️ Labor of Love: A Redditor is using ChatGPT to build custom video games and tools for his brother, who lives with a progressive condition affecting his speech and movement. Watch how it works here.

📖 More to the Story: Is reinforcement learning all it’s cracked up to be? ‘Yes and no,’ says OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in this viral post.

In a new interview, Mark Zuckerberg argues that top researchers (just like OpenAI’s Jason Wei) are flocking to Meta not for the money but because the company has the best shot at reaching superintelligence. (Here’s a shorter clip, too.)

Runway released a new AI-powered motion capture model that can track a subject’s face, hands, and body to quickly transport them into any scene. Watch it in action here.

Anthropic unveiled a new version of Claude for Enterprise geared toward financial institutions. It features a special prompt library as well as AI-powered insights into market data from sources like PitchBook and Morningstar.

PRODUCTIVITY

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• 💁 Callab: AI voice agents that make human-like phone calls.

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PROMPT STATION

Automated Research Reports

Prompt: "You are a world-class strategy consultant trained by McKinsey, BCG, and Bain.
Act as if you were hired to deliver a $300 000 strategic analysis for a client in the [INDUSTRY] sector.

Mission
1. Analyze the current state of the [INDUSTRY] market.
2. Identify key trends, emerging threats, and disruptive innovations.
3. Map the top 3-5 competitors and benchmark their business models, strengths, weaknesses, pricing, distribution, and brand positioning.
4. Apply SWOT, Porter’s Five Forces, and value-chain analysis to assess risks and opportunities.
5. Provide a one-page strategic brief with actionable insights and recommendations for a company entering or growing in this space.

Return everything in concise bullet points or tables, ready to paste into slides. Think like a McKinsey partner preparing for a C-suite meeting."

Source: godofprompt

Superheroes watching TV

ChatGPT Prompt: Create a photo of [enter superhero name] watching to [enter cartoon name] cartoon

Whenever you’re ready to take the next step

• Check out our Top 125 AI Tools

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Until next time — Zain & the Superhuman AI team